You Let Loss Be Your Guide
by allatraka
Summary: Iris West discovers a secret and works through some things with her best friend.
i.

For weeks Iris had been having dreams that had her waking up clutching the clothes at the front of her chest. They weren't nightmares, exactly, but they left her disoriented, confused, like the feeling she gets when she enters a room and can't remember why she's there. She always felt an urgency when she woke— _I know I need something, that's why I'm here! But dammit, what is it?_ —an insistence that there was some meaning she was supposed to hold on to, something she was supposed to remember. But these dreams, so unlike the ones she usually had, slipped her mind like a breeze down her back and left a gap in their wake. After one of these dreams she'd spend her day puzzling it, but when she tried to come up with an image all she'd get was a blank, a curious buzzing whiteness that left her irritated. Instead of her dream she'd simply remember sitting in her bed with her knees pulled to her chest, watching the dawn outside her window turn to morning. She'd finally taken to sleeping with her phone in her hand, so when she woke she'd be gripping it instead of her nightshirt, and before the not-quite-a-nightmare would scatter her thumbs would fly across her bright light of a screen and she'd put down whatever came to her mind. After three weeks she had a list:

—a lot of red

—rushing air

—but why would you put almonds in brownies?

—barry? (but why would…)

—some kind of voice…is it me? or is it someone else?

—always the same voice

—is this about mom…?

—…wide spaces and rushing air

— _who's_ fast now?

—vanessa williams?

—the precinct

ii.

Iris didn't really feel like a journalist. When she was researching a subject and checking facts and helping someone to get past their disbelief of their own experiences, their disbelief that they could have been saved by something they couldn't see, she didn't feel like what the PhD program at her university described as "pioneering individuals in the accumulation, organization, and dissemination of knowledge." What she felt was the way she had when she was a little girl and she'd built an entire city with Barry's Legos. She'd worked on it for months, a singular obsession that had come after other intense but brief relationships with piano and karate and _A Wrinkle in Time_. She'd built it in the living room, and both her dad and Barry had been so impressed that they'd insisted it stay right there in front of the TV, on display for everyone to see. She'd quite vocally agreed with them. Her dad had taken a picture of her with it. In it she was standing with her legs parted and her fists on her hips and what could only be described as a smirk on her lips, and he'd sent the picture to the Lego company with an accompanying letter in her loopy 12-year-old-girl scrawl, and they'd sent her back a picture of _her_ picture framed up on a wall of the US Lego factory surrounded by workers all holding up their thumbs and smiling at the camera. They got a discount to a Legoland park.

She was gaining a finer understanding of time and space. After work she would sit down at her notebook and plan to write for one hour. Three hours later she would emerge from some other place and she would have to reacquaint herself to her physical surroundings—the chair beneath her, the shoe that hand fallen off her dangling foot. She'd have four thousand words and another article that was much too long for the original scope of her blog. It had started as a project to explore objectivity in digital media, but now it had turned into something else, something that required her to shape a view of the world and convince her readers it was a truth. It wasn't only her classmates and professor who were reading what she wrote, but total strangers, hundreds of them.

And then she tripped upon a name—Harrison Wells. Harrison Wells. The physicist who'd explained that Barry's heart wasn't stopping at all, that it had been beating too fast for the EKG machines to register. Barry had always admired him—"He's one of the foremost minds of his generation, Iris! By our age he'd already authored theorems that challenged the very foundations of what we know!"—but her dad had very clearly expressed skepticism when he'd approached him with the proposition of switching Barry over to STAR Labs. She'd been the one to convince him. It wasn't so much that she trusted a man Barry regarded so well as that in the face of Barry's inertia she'd become reckless. When she searched his name in the journal databases provided by her school, page after page of articles appeared with titles full of words she'd heard Barry say before. She read many of them now, slowly, with a dictionary at hand and a notepad she filled with angry emojis and questions marks. When she searched his name in Google page after page of articles appeared, but this time they weren't peer reviewed and groundbreaking. They had titles like "Particle Accelerator Explosion at STAR Labs: The End of a Dream"; "17 Dead & Countless More Wounded in STAR Labs Explosion"; "Rescue Teams Search Rubble for Missing Persons"; "Science Gone Awry: What the STAR Labs Catastrophe Can Teach Us About the Privatization of Science Research." Article after article about Harrison Wells and his brilliance, about how his brilliance blinded him and everyone around him and led to the explosion that had made a waste of the west side of Central City, that had caused the lighting that had struck Barry, that had made a wreckage of her life for nine months.

A celebrated physicist one day and a maligned and failed scientist the next? Before the particle accelerator explosion not one day had gone by without the 7 o'clock news running a story on their local genius, and afterwards even national news stations had devoted endless hours to covering the story. But after a few weeks of endless coverage was total silence. There was an explosion. Some people died. Some people got hurt. STAR Labs was shut down. People were shocked and bewildered and angry, as they were about slow responses to floods and subprime mortgage loans and every other news story that made the rounds at prime time. There was a gap there, something missing. Something that needed to be articulated, but wasn't.

iii.

During the nine months Barry was in a coma she would play games with herself. "If I don't spill any coffee for the rest of the day Barry won't die." "If the bus comes in the next 5 minutes Dad will be fine, and so will I." "If I can make it across the room in 15 steps then Barry will wake up." "If I can hold a quarter back from three customers without them noticing then Barry will wake up." "If I can cross the street on a red light without any cars hitting me then Barry will wake up." She always won. Barry didn't wake up. She knew the games were silly, but she played them anyway, and she couldn't help but tell the universe, "I've done my part. Now you do yours. You promised."

When she carried large trays full of coffee and snacks over to a table, she would place all her hope and longing at one end and her fear at the other and dare herself not to be able to balance it.

At the hospital and at STAR Labs she never touched Barry in front of her dad. She didn't know why. She didn't do it consciously until she realized she was doing it. Her dad kissed Barry's forehead and leaned over to hug him, he'd hold his hand to his face and tuck his sheets in closer around him. But she would sit up in her chair with her legs crossed and she would read to him, either _National Geographic_ or a letter his father had sent him from prison. These she would read in a loud, clear voice; she'd read them once, twice, three times in a row, because even though she couldn't do anything to help Barry, she could at least reassure Mr. Allen that if Barry really could hear anything, then he'd heard his words to him.

She once leaned over his chest and pressed her ear to it, listening for his heartbeat. It was there—it had to be cause the ventilator said everything was fine—but she didn't hear anything. When she straightened she realized she'd been crying and that the whole front of his flimsy robe was soaked in her tears, but she'd gotten used to the constancy and spontaneity of her grief, and it was no longer a surprise. She'd framed one side of his face with her palm and used her thumb to straighten out his eyebrow, to brush across his eyelashes, his chin, and then her dad had come in and she'd snatched her hand away and made an excuse about having a paper to finish.

She once whispered in his ear, "Barry can you hear me? Barry I don't know if you can hear me, but please don't leave me. Please don't go. I miss you so much, Barry, and I'm breaking. Dad is breaking. And we don't know what to do. What are we supposed to do without you Barry? Please, god, please." She said all this while holding his hand between hers and tight to her chest, willing him to twitch a finger or frown or anything, and chiding herself for being disappointed when he didn't. She'd kissed him then, on his temple, and then she'd wiped her lipstick away with her thumb.

She spent a lot of time looking at Barry. Had he always had that mole on his neck? Was it wrong of her to think it was a little bit funny how he looked with his jaw slack and his mouth a little open? He became familiar to her in a way he hadn't been before—the curve of his lips, the length of his eyelashes, the way his ears stuck out from his head. All these became precise features to her, not just lips or eyelashes or ears, but Barry's lips, Barry's eyelashes, Barry's ears. _If he wakes up—fuck, no, when when_ — _when he wakes up I'm gonna call him Mr. Snuffleupagus and I won't tell him why._

iv.

Barry was scrawny for an 11 year old: shorter than all the other kids in their grade, certainly shorter than her, and giving no indication that he would become, essentially, a giraffe. When her dad first brought him home Iris towered over him, and he made her feel like a fat wobbly bubble about to pop.

It took some time to adjust to another person in the house. New bathroom use times in the morning and before bed, another place set on the table at every meal, a lot more yelling than there had ever been. But Iris adjusted to it. Barry didn't take up too much space, even though he did get loud sometimes. Usually he got loud after he came from seeing his doctor. His face would be all red and splotchy, and he'd stomp around in his shoes until her dad would say in his don't-play-with-me-now voice, "Barry, upstairs. Now."

One day, after her dad had said this and after Barry had marched upstairs, hitting his book bag against all the steps and slamming his door shut, Iris walked up to it and knocked sharply. Barry opened the door a crack, peeping through with just one eye. He looked her up and down with that one eye, like the fish they'd seen at the Central City Zoo, and then said "I'm sorry," and closed the door gingerly, making sure it made no sound.

Iris knocked on it again, this time using the side of her fist instead of her knuckles.

This time when Barry opened the door he walked away from it, leaving it to let her come in. He went over to a corner where he had a glass case with rocks covering the bottom and seemed absorbed in counting them as Iris walked around his room, hands behind her back, inspecting.

"So," she said at last.

"So?" Barry said.

Silence.

"So what's wrong with you?" Iris asked.

He rounded on her so quick it made her take a step back. He had his hands on his hips and was glaring.

"Sorry, sorry," Iris said, "I meant what's wrong?"

"Nothing."

"Then why are you crying?"

"I'm not crying."

Iris wanted to point out that he clearly had tears in his eyes and that his cheeks were wet. But she thought about the talk she and her dad had had before Barry had officially moved in, about where his dad was now, and where his mom no longer was; she thought about the rhyme some kids at school chanted whenever he walked by: "Bar-ry, Bar-ry, quite contrary, where did your mommy go? Your dad's locked up cause he's a nut, or maybe cause your mom was a ho"; and she thought about what she liked for people to do when she was upset. So she flopped onto his bed and let her feet dangle a few inches above the floor, pulled one of the ribbons from her hair, and started playing with it. But she didn't ask him any more questions. After a few minutes Barry pulled out a comic book, and then they were reading it together. She kept interrupting him to ask what was going on and why who was doing what and what was up with all the freaky muscle-a-ture—"You mean musculature," "I _mean_ this guy's got a vein on his arm the size of a road. How can he even move?"—but Barry didn't mind. She let him keep her ribbon to use as a bookmark.

"Iris?"

"Mmm."

"Can I tell you something?"

"Ok."

"It's…It's about my mom."

"…Ok."

"But you have to tell me something first. Like a secret. Something special."

"That's stupid. If you want to tell me something just tell me. I'm not gonna _trade_ you for it."

" _Fine._ "

"Fine."

"You won't believe me."

"I already believe you."

"Promise?"

"I promise."

"You won't laugh?"

"I won't laugh."

"And you won't tell Joe?"

"But Daddy already knows."

"Iris!"

"All right, I promise! I promise I won't laugh, and I won't tell Daddy, and I won't tell anyone at school, and I won't tell your doctor, and I won't go to the cops, and I promise I'll believe you."

"Ok." Barry took a deep breath, and then he told her a story. It was a story she'd heard before from her dad and from the TV and from all her friends at school, but she'd never heard it from Barry. His version was different. His version was cooler and more exciting. His version was confusing and made no sense. His version was sadder. It made her want to cry in a way none of the other versions did. His version made her angry, too. It made something hot rise up in her chest, and it made her think, _That's not right. That's not fair._

In the quiet while Iris thought all this Barry asked, "You think I'm crazy, don't you?" When Iris didn't answer Barry asked again, "Do you think I'm crazy?" His voice was shaking.

Iris considered him, his weird boy clothes and his affinity for red, his gross pizza toppings and how he sometimes changed the sheets on his bed in the early mornings before her dad woke up, and she said, "I don't think you're crazy, Barry. I think it's sad your mom is—is dead. And I wish you could live with your Dad." And in a smaller voice, almost a whisper, she said, "But I'm glad you get to live with us."

v.

They had different tastes in music. Iris loved rap and pop and could listen to Ella Fitzgerald for days. She always had music playing in her room at a low volume, and she left the radio on when she left home, even though she knew it was wasting electricity. She danced when she cooked, she danced when she cleaned, she danced in the shower, she danced in her seat while she drove, and more than once Barry had caught her dancing in the grocery store. Whenever some new dance move was en vogue (actually one of her favorite groups; for her 17th birthday her dad had gotten her a record player and Barry had gotten her all their albums on vinyl; she'd hugged them both, kissing her dad on the lips and about to do the same to Barry but moving at the last minute to brush one at the side of his mouth) she would practice it with her friends in front of the mirror, their chorus of voices and giggles spilling out her room and over to Barry's. She used to try to get Barry to dance, placing him in front of her mirror and demonstrating, then holding her hand out for him to do the same. He would display some bizarre approximation of her movements, like some clay animation doll in a behind-the-scenes video, all goofy-smiled and floppy-handed, and she'd critique him with every move, pushing his shoulders back and poking him between his shoulder blades and adjusting his hips—"No, Barry, like _this._ Stop trying to make me laugh and pay attention!"—and tapping the beat out on his chest like she saw them do in the movies until one day she glanced up at him (she'd had to look up at him by then) and he was looking at her with such intensity and earnestness that she decided maybe it was fine that the only thing Barry could dance to with any degree of finesse was the Macarena.

Barry, on the other hand, enjoyed listening to varying ambient noises over the sound of cicadas—"Iris, do you know they actually have five eyes? And they live underground for most their lives feeding on fluids from the roots of trees, and then a whole bunch of them will emerge all at once and be active for a few weeks—by active I mean mating—"

It had been easier, when they'd been living in the same home, to share the moments that made a friendship as strong as theirs. She didn't have to tell him about her mother's absence, because it was present in the photographs on her bedside table and the mantelpiece—but she did anyway because he was there and he listened. She didn't have to ask him what her dad was to him because it was there in the way he asked, "Joe, what do you think of Central City Tech as a safety?" When they spoke on the phone or texted, when they met up for coffee, when they saw each other at the precinct, their greetings were never "Hi," or "What's up?" but "Barry they changed the flakes in Strawberry Crunch and it's destroyed my entire morning routine," or "How much would you hate me if I started using AXE?" They had inside jokes that had started when they were kids and had now morphed into something so intricate and fundamental to their understanding of the world that either one of them could take whatever conversation they were having and tie it back to the original incarnation of the joke. Their friendship was built on things perhaps unsaid but intimately understood, and though this was a consequence of sharing the same time and space, it never occurred to Iris that it was something that could be disturbed.

Before Barry's coma the longest they'd spent away from each other was when she and Barry had gone away to college. Her semester started earlier than his, and so the three of them had driven upstate to her campus in a van her dad had borrowed from Captain Singh. They'd taken the scenic route and stopped at more rest stops than they really needed, and after Barry and her dad had helped her unpack and had dinner in the dining hall, her dad had kissed and hugged her, almost lifting her off her feet. He'd cradled her face between his hands, wetness twinkling in his eyes. "Do good," he'd said, "and answer your phone." And then he'd left them alone together. Barry hugged her, too. But his was something less of an embrace, something more feral. She'd felt his fingers curling into the fabric of her shirt, and she'd curled her own fingers in return, closing her eyes very tight. They'd stood there clutching at each other for a long time. They neither of them cried.

That first semester away was exhilarating as it was frightening, and though they'd spoken over the phone and texted and Skyped and knew everything that had happened in each other's lives, she still couldn't wait to actually see Barry in front of her and tell him everything all over again. Her Thanksgiving vacation began before his and she and her dad weren't expecting him for at least three days after she herself came back home, but the very night after her arrival she saw him step out of the taxi that stopped in front of their door, and before he could make it down their driveway she'd already thrown on her coat and was running out the door to tackle-hug him to the ground. Their voices were a chorus of "Iris! Iris! Iris!" and "Barry! Barry! Barry!" and in the midst of their scrambling up to their feet and her cries of disbelief that he was really there, Barry had reached over and zipped her coat up, right up to her neck, the same gesture he always did because she had a bad habit of leaving her coat open. He'd grinned at her and said, "I can't believe you still do that," and a warmth had spread through her to know that nothing had changed between them.

Inside they made tea and she texted her dad and while they waited for him to come she let him try to give as much of himself as he had missed of her, and she did the same. They were dissolving into giggles when her dad finally came. He reached for them both and pulled them into a hug that had them stumbling round and round the kitchen under the weight of their happiness.

There was no goodbye before Barry was struck by lightning. When he woke up he was all smiles and quick reflexes, like he'd come back from a vacation and not from several deaths. She couldn't help but feel that they were delineating his absence, giving a shape to this indefinite thing that had stretched before her but was now unquestionably in the past. He asked her nothing of those nine months, and she offered him nothing of them, and the nothing lay between them when he dragged her along to go shopping for a new microscope for his home lab, when they teased her dad about his crush on Pam Grier, when she picked the bottom of her muffin apart and gave it to him to eat.

vi.

Of course the one dream that didn't dissolve the moment she woke was the one about kissing Barry. In it she and Barry stood facing one another, hands stuffed in pockets, quiet in a way they rarely were. In it she asked him if it was ok for her to kiss him and he nodded yes. In it his eyes fluttered closed and his tongue yielded under hers and he whimpered into her mouth, maybe it was her name, maybe it was something else, but it tugged at something in her all the same, and when she woke that feeling of being touched and undone lingered.

She'd thought passingly of kissing Barry before—how it would feel, how he would taste—but it had never made her feel uncomfortable. Because, she'd supposed, they were Iris and Barry, and there was nothing but comfort between them. She knew she _could_ never kiss Barry, which was a shame because…because thinking that she could set something blooming in her, something very close to fear, but somehow more delicate.

She didn't want to think of what that thing that was not fear but reminded her of it could be, and so she didn't want to think of the dream. The only way to stop thinking about it—the way his lips fit against hers, the way he pulled his hands out of his pockets and pulled her closer to him—was to focus on her work. She asked both Eddie and her dad questions. She asked them casually so they wouldn't get too suspicious: "So, any new crazy stories from the tip line?" or "I heard about that fire over on 4th and Weston. Crazy how all those people were able to get out, huh?" But Eddie read her blog and he wasn't fooled.

"Iris," he asked once, "why do you need us to tell you about this if you're just going to meet up with this flash character," he held up his hands and made jazz fingers when he said the name, "later on? Won't you be asking him about it?"

She'd rolled her eyes at him and leaned over to take a sip from his latte. "I'm a responsible blogger, Eddie," she always called herself a blogger, never a journalist, when she spoke to him about it. "I have to explore different perspectives of the story so I can deliver a balanced article."

"I'd hardly call what you write _balanced_."

"Excuse me!"

"Ok, ok, Fox Mulder, calm down," he'd answered, holding his hands up in mock defense.

She'd taken it as a compliment.

Barry became uncharacteristically reticent whenever she asked him about cases involving The Flash, which was very annoying and which she let him know was so. So she decided instead of asking him to tell her about The Flash she would ask him to tell her about Harrison Wells. She'd become a little fascinated with him. She'd read and re-read several of his articles, frequently stopping by the physics department at her university to get help with some of the denser ones; had skimmed through the college journal he'd edited and contributed to when he'd been at MIT; and had a document open in her notebook detailing a timeline of the building of the particle accelerator and its subsequent demise, with Venn diagrams illustrating the larger unifying concepts of Wells's work and how they had reached their peak in the project that was the particle accelerator. She had her laptop with her, but she'd printed the document out. She wanted to be able to spread the pages out on the huge table in the middle of his lab, the easier to show him just what Wells had lost when the explosion went off.

She was supposed to meet him at the precinct. He was, as usual, late. Eddie and her dad were out on a case. Captain Singh nodded a greeting to her as she passed him in the lobby, as did all the other cops who had known her since she was a little girl. After waiting in his lab for thirty minutes and sending him four texts, she decided enough was enough and that she'd just leave the document in his locker for the next day.

When she opened Barry's locker—the combination was his mother's birthday—the first thing she saw was the picture the two of them had taken together two Christmases ago. It made her smile. She had the same picture captioned in one of her Facebook albums with, "Christmas with the fam!" The second thing she saw was a suit. A one-piece, dark red suit. A suit with a mask for the hood. With gold, lightning-shaped rods at two sides of the face. She grabbed at the suit with both hands, disbelieving. Was it for one of the many conventions that regularly made their way to Central City? _Oh my god, did Barry actually_ make _this?_ Had he been feigning his disinterest in The Flash this whole time? But why would he? He'd never kept any of his nerdy interests from her before, and this was something they were both into! But as she looked more closely at the suit, skimming her fingers over the ridges on the knees, the lightning bolt on the chest, she noticed that it was worn, not all bright and shiny like the other costumes Barry had made. There were nicks and scratches on the feet. And suddenly she understood this wasn't a reproduction of The Flash's suit. This _was_ The Flash's suit. Which meant—

 _Barry…is The Flash?_

First wonder, then something very much like joy thrummed through her and she let out a shout. Barry was The Flash! Everything they'd talked about as kids, all the theories he'd shared with her about his uncanny cases, it was all true! His dad! His dad _didn't_ kill his mom, and now they had proof! Now they could show her dad, he could give like a demonstration or something, and then maybe her dad would believe, and maybe he'd be willing to help him. Of course he would! He loved Barry as much as she did, he just needed something concrete he could hold onto before he ever committed himself to anything. And this. This was as concrete as it got. Barry. The Flash. She practically crowed it out loud and did a little dance right there in the lab.

Wait. Barry was The Flash. The Flash was Barry. She had been writing about Barry. She had been writing about Barry _Allen_. She'd interviewed The Flash and had _flirted_ with him. She'd said he was _cool_. She'd also said that he was a much needed help to the municipal employees of Central City, given the steeply rising homicide rate, providing a service the city simply didn't have the funds or the knowledge to provide; that despite his lack of forthrightness when it came to what he did with the other super-people he fought, he had proven himself to be trustworthy and had not given any indication that he was in league with any of them; and that his working outside the established governing system was something he would have to reconcile with the public he served, lest he become a vigilante. But still. She'd called him cool. To his face. _Oh my god._

Iris wrung her laptop out her bag and opened it on the lab table to type, "THE FLASH HAS AN UNSETTLING YOUNG REPUBLICAN HAIRCUT AND PERHAPS SHOULD CONSIDER A NEW HAIRSTYLIST."

She deleted it.

Then she typed,"WHY DOES THE FLASH WEAR A MASK? IS IT BECAUSE HE LOOKS SO MUCH LIKE WALDO, FROM WHERE'S WALDO? WHAT IS HE HIDING? THINK ABOUT IT. HIS SUIT IS RED (MAROON WHATEVER). WALDO'S BEANIE IS RED. COINCIDENCE?"

She deleted it.

Then she typed, "HUMAN FLASH? MORE LIKE HUMA R."

She deleted it.

Then she typed, "THE FLASH IS A LYING LIAR WHO LIES. WHY RE-INFORCED TRI-POLYMER? SO HIS PANTS WON'T CATCH FIRE, THE FILTHY LIAR?"

She deleted it.

Then she wrote, "THE FLASH IS SUPERFLUOUSLY TALL AND HAS THIS WAY OF TUCKING HIS HANDS IN HIS POCKETS WHEN HE'S TALKING SO THAT HE ENDS UP WAVING HIS POCKETS AROUND AS HE GESTURES. IT IS ENDEARING AND ADORABLE AND I AM FURIOUS." She stared at her screen for approximately 7 minutes and then screamed into her hand. Then she deleted it.

Then she texted Barry: "MR. BARRY FUCKING ALLEN. WHERE ARE YOU? tom/my place 7. DO. NOT. BE. LATE. and dont call me tonight, nerd, idc if youre sorry."

Iris was so excited about her discovery that she spent the next hour pacing the lab, going over all her encounters with The Flash and everything she'd ever said to Barry about him. She had so many questions for him. Like that night The Flash stopped armed robberies at three different corner stores. He'd been with her the entire night! So how had he managed it? And where did he get his suit? And how did he know where all these crimes were happening? Did he listen in on the police radio? But sometimes he stopped crimes that hadn't even been called in yet! And why on earth would he keep his suit in a locker that anyone could break into? It wasn't until she was climbing into a cab to take her home that she thought, _Oh, and!—And…and…why didn't he tell me?_

vii.

She realized they weren't just dreams. They were dreams of memories of moments she'd never had. He'd told her, but he hadn't. She'd heard him, but she hadn't. Either way she hadn't known. She hadn't _known_. She was able to place the curious sensation she felt when The Flash rushed away from her alongside the few things she'd been able to wrest from her dreams. The rushing air. All that red. The voice. Barry's voice. She recognized it, now. She felt stupid that she hadn't before, and she was almost more furious at him for making her feel that way than she was for his lying to her. Did he know, she wondered, what that did to a person, to tell them something so that they could not know it, to leave their side and return but not tell them? Did he understand the hollowness she'd felt those nights after her dreams, the dreams that were not really dreams but echoes of a reality she had no memory of experiencing?

That night Barry wasn't late. He rung her doorbell at exactly seven, even though he still had keys. When she opened the door he was standing there with a sheepish smile on his face. "Sorry," he said. "Something came up." He stepped past her into the hallway and shrugged off his jacket. 'Something.' How many times since he'd woken up had he been that vague with her?

"But I'm here now," he said. "So what did you want to show me?"

He made his way to the kitchen, opened the fridge door, and pulled out ingredients to make a sandwich. "Is it that video of those kids giving their cat a bath? Cause I kept from watching it so I could see it with you." He yawned widely as he placed an over-generous amount of salami and provolone between three slices of bread. He gestured at it, "You want one?" Iris shook her head. He returned everything to the fridge, pulled out a can of Coke, pressed down on the towering sandwich, and carefully brought it to his mouth to take a bite. A smile spread across his face, he patted his stomach and said around the mouthful "Mmmmm, it's so good Iris, I can't believe you don't want in on this." He placed the sandwich on a plate and carried it and his drink into the living room. She followed him.

Between more bites of his food he said to her, "I pissed Captain Singh off again. I was trying to make a pun but I think I just ended up making him think that I was saying he had a receding hairline." He was sitting at one end of the couch. Iris stood a few feet away from him, arms behind her back. She didn't respond.

Barry looked at her, blinking, took another bite of his sandwich, chewed, swallowed. "Are you ok?" he asked. Iris nodded. Barry stared at her for a moment, and it stretched out between them for longer than it actually was. Finally he stuffed the rest of his sandwich in his mouth gulped down the rest of his soda, and said, "Iris, are you mad at me?"

She titled her head to the side, pointed her chin out. "Mad at you?" she parroted. "Is there any reason why I should be mad at you?"

His eyes searched the length of the room, rested again on her face. "I…don't think so?"

She shrugged. "Then I must not be mad at you." And she made her way around the couch to sit on the far side of it, leaving a cushioned seat between them.

"You're being cryptic," he said, and he leaned forward to face her. "Is something wrong?"

Iris considered telling him exactly what was wrong, but she didn't know how to ask him, she didn't know the words to use. What would she say? _Why haven't you told me? Do you not want me to know? Do you not trust me? Do you think I can't keep a secret? Or that I would reveal your identity to someone who could hurt you? Why would you keep something like that from me?_

Instead she said, "You know, you've never asked me."

"Asked you what?"

"Asked me what it was like. Those nine months."

He turned away from her, leaned back into the cushions of the couch. Quietly he said, "I didn't think you wanted to talk about it."

"I do."

"Then…what was it like?"

"It was hard," she began, "I'd never seen Dad cry like that before. I was the one who had to tell Henry, because Dad still didn't want to see him, even with you like…the way you were."

She took a deep breath. "They kept on telling us your heart was stopping, and every time we thought you'd died. You kept dying, over and over again. And it was so weird, because you came back, but you still weren't there. And every time you came back we didn't know if it was the last time. I thought it would get better, when Wells explained what was happening and he moved you to STAR Labs, but it was actually worse. Because then we _knew_ , if something happened to you there, that was it. And we waited and waited and waited and waited. And you never woke up, Barry. You just…walked into Jitters one day." She gave a shaky laugh. She'd started to cry.

"Iris—"

"Don't you dare say it," she said, "It wasn't your fault."

"I know," he said, "but—"

He was interrupted by a buzzing.

His phone. His eyes opened wide. "Wait," he said, he took out his phone, he looked at the screen, he looked up at her with a face that looked like something in it was broken, "Iris, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I have to go, please don't be mad, I swear I'll explain everything tomorrow, no tonight, I'll be back tonight, just wait for me, please," he said it all as he got up from the couch and tried not to run to the door, Iris followed him, and just as he took the final step down from her porch she called out "Barry!"

And he stopped.

He turned.

She knew what it was. She knew he wouldn't explain anything later, that later he'd just give her another lie. She knew she should let him go, that only something as important as a life would take him away from her right then, but a tiny part of her also knew that if she really wanted to, if she set her face in the right way and her voice in the right tone, he might not go, he might stay. She'd never been so selfish before. She'd been as angry, when her father hadn't let her apply to the academy, but she'd never been so wretchedly selfish. Because what was she, for him to say to her that he was here now, as if she were an afterthought, someone to come to after he was done with something else, something he didn't even have the courtesy to tell her about?

She walked down to him and placed her palms on either side of his face. She saw that there were dark circles beneath his eyes. She looked down at his lips, and instead of kissing them she kissed his cheek. She said, "Never mind, you can go," and she let him go. His brow furrowed. He didn't turn away from her. He walked backwards, facing her the entire way, his face scrunched up like he was about to cry, he turned when he got to the sidewalk, he kept looking over his shoulder at her, he rounded the sidewalk and disappeared behind the neighbor's bushes. The second she no longer saw him Iris dashed across the lawn to the corner but he was gone—just as she'd known he would be.

viii.

She couldn't forget how he'd been smiling when she first saw him again. It had been so surreal, to see him standing, moving, animated, making his way to her. A disbelief had taken hold of her, and for the slightest moment the sight of him was upsetting because it jarred so starkly with what she'd known to be true—that she hadn't seen Barry's smile in nine months, that for almost a year he'd been inert and silent. But she'd pulled him to her and held him in her arms. He was solid and warm. He'd held her back, arms around her waist like they always went, and then he'd placed her hand over his heart and held it there. "It's still beating," he'd said, grinning at her as though that should have been assurance enough that it always would. "It's still beating," he'd said, and she'd felt it, quick and strong like a pebble skipped across wide water, and so she'd tried to fit those nine months, that aching gap, into those three words, "It's still beating." _He's still here. He's not gone. He won't leave. Please, god, please._

ix.

It took a lot of work to avoid Barry. She was so used to having him in her life that when she chose not to any longer it was like she was working against a physical force. It wasn't that she was cutting him out of her life. It was just that she needed some space. So she stopped taking his phone calls and stopped answering his texts; she ignored all his emails and her Facebook notifications, and when her dad asked her "What's going on between you two?" she answered simply, "Nothing you need to worry about."

She focused on her work. Something was beginning to emerge from the mountain she was carving. She'd thought her story on Wells had been about the downfall of a great man, she'd been planning on interviewing him. But the more she read and the more she put together, the more she found that that wasn't the story at all. Wells didn't seem to have a birthdate. He was an internationally recognized figure in the world of physics, but he'd never left the country. Not for his studies, not for a lecture tour, not for a conference. Everything in his career had gone exceptionally smoothly until the night of the particle accelerator explosion.

She started focusing less on Wells himself, and started looking more at the things around him, at STAR Labs. She went back to the questions she had before she became fascinated by who the man told the world he was. A gap, she'd thought, something missing. What was it? She started comparing random data to each other, just to see what it would show. The number of homicides in the city was up. The spike had started just a few weeks after the particle accelerator explosion. Other things were up in the city. The number of hospital admittances, strange injuries that were attributed to freak accidents. There was a man running around with a gun that could freeze an entire city block. Where had that gun come from? She went back to the deluge of articles that had been printed after the explosion: the number dead, the number missing, the number injured; the cost of reconstruction, if that were even a possibility; exactly how much had been destroyed.

And then she stumbled on a thought she'd never considered before. What if it in all of these links there wasn't just a correlation? What if it was a causation? In all her research she'd never considered—no, she'd never come across anything that detailed the biological impacts of the particle accelerator explosion. She searched some more. She found nothing. She was incredulous. The Flash ( _Barry_ , she tried not to think) had appeared after the particle accelerator explosion, too. Was he a result of the explosion? Were the super-powered people he fought a result of the explosion? If they were, then how many people had been affected, and how come no one knew about it? They were, after all, citizens of Central City, even if they were criminals. And, if what she was thinking was true, then their criminal activity had been augmented by the explosion, by Harrison Wells's work.

But none of these were the questions that disturbed Iris the most. _Why am I the one asking these questions and why haven't they been answered already?_ She thought of how many people still did not believe The Flash existed, and she thought she could understand a world where such a void would be allowed to exist.

She had originally named her piece "The Undoing of Harrison Wells." She renamed it. It was the longest piece she'd ever written, and after she edited it, re-edited it, and re-re-edited it, she copy and pasted it into a post on her blog and hit "Save," then attached it to an email to the editor of the Central City Post. She hadn't yet decided just how big she wanted this to be. She mulled it over for days, her heartbeat rising every time she thought of it, and right when she finally came to a decision new questions formed in her mind.

Where had Barry woken up? At STAR Labs. Who would have access to reinforced tri-polymer? STAR Labs. Who had figured out that his heart was till beating, and so could explain to him what was happening to his body? STAR Labs. Who would be able to keep up the maintenance of a suit that had to withstand speeds higher than 340 miles per second? STAR Labs. He was working with STAR Labs. He was working with Drs. Snow and Ramon. He was working with Wells. But it wasn't just Barry. _The Flash_ was working with STAR Labs. The Flash was running around the city, getting rid of ( _What does getting rid of even mean?_ , she wondered) super-powered criminals—citizens—that were created, essentially, by STAR Labs, but which no one actually knew were created by STAR Labs.

She had to tell him.

That night she finally texted Barry: "let's meet tomorrow at jitters after closing"

He responded immediately: "yes. are you ok?"

"i'm fine"

"i'm so sorry iris. i had to leave that night. i had to take care of something. but i swear it won't happen again."

"don't make promises you can't keep"

"what?"

Iris didn't text him back.

"iris?"

She didn't respond.

"can i come over?"

She didn't respond.

"can i call you?"

She didn't respond.

"hello?"

Was he…getting angry? Iris laughed out loud.

She finally answered him. "let's just meet at jitters tomorrow ok? don't be late"

"fine."

x.

When he walked into Jitters he didn't smile at her. A first. He'd lost weight. The dark spots beneath his eyes had deepened. She gestured for him to sit at one of the booths and he slid in, eyes on her as she followed suit.

"Barry," she began, "I'm going to ask you a question. And I want you to answer me truthfully."

He nodded at her.

She felt as though she were carrying a teacup full to the brim, and that it was very important that none of it spill, and so she had to tiptoe with it braced in her hands very carefully, one small step, then another. She cleared her throat. She asked him, "Is there anything you want to tell me?"

He didn't answer her right away. Instead he took his hands out of his pockets and twined his fingers together on the table. He looked out the window and Iris counted the seconds. _Please_ , she thought, _please just do this for me, Barry. Please just tell me_

He turned back to her. "No. There isn't anything."

"Damn it, Barry!" She banged a fist on the table so hard it shook.

He leaned away from her sharply. "Iris what the fu—"

"I _know_ , Barry! I know you're The Flash!"

If she didn't feel like a vice was closing in around her heart she would have laughed at the look on his face.

"Wh-what are you talking about?"

She was incredulous. "Really?! You're gonna keep lying to me?!"

"What? No! I just—how do you know?!"

"Does it matter?"

"No! No."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I meant to! Joe—" he started.

"What?"

"Your dad asked me not to tell you," he said quietly. He wasn't looking at her.

She laughed in his face. "So, what, my dad knows? My dad knows you're The Flash and he didn't tell me? He knows and he tells _you_ not to tell _me_ , and _you_ listen to him? Yeah right."

When he didn't look up at her she knew he was telling the truth. It hit her like a fist in the chest. Her dad had been lying to her? Not just Barry? She thought of all the questions she'd asked him about The Flash. She thought of the excitement she'd felt when she'd first found out, how she'd wanted to tell him, how much she'd hoped he would believe, how she'd planned to get Barry to convince him it was true. But he already knew. They both did. And they'd both thought that she shouldn't know. She recognized the prickly heat climbing up her neck and she had to lean over and press her face onto the cool of the table as the tears came.

Barry was out of his seat too quickly, something happened to her hair, he was next to her before she saw him leave his side of the booth and his hand was pushing her hair away from her face, his fingers were sliding over her tears, they were so warm, he was saying "No, Iris, please, don't cry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, we were just trying to protect you—" but she sat up and slapped his hand away and cried, "Don't touch me!"

His eyes were wide. He looked wretched.

"Get back over there."

He did as she said.

She couldn't stop crying. She covered her face with her hands and screamed into them, and then her sobs were smaller and quieter. She cried until all she had in her was a hollowness and hiccups, and then she let her hands drop to her sides. Barry was still there. They sat across from each other in the dark and quiet of the shop for a long time.

When Iris felt she could talk again she sat up and wiped at her face with some napkins. Barry made to reach out to her, but she gave him a look so severe that he snatched his hand back.

"I don't think I can talk about this right now." Her voice was small and raw.

"Ok."

She took a deep breath and settled back in her seat. "How much do you know about Harrison Wells?"

"Wells? He's the, well he used to be the director of STAR Labs."

"Right. And?"

"And he got hurt during the explosion."

She nodded.

"And you work with him, don't you? You, The Flash?"

"Ye-yes."

She nodded curtly. She turned to unclasp her purse. She took some papers out of it. Her article. She placed it on the table and pushed it toward Barry. He glanced down at it. "Revisiting the STAR Labs Explosion: A Central Question for Central City," he read. "What is this?"

"Just read it."

He speed read it. His hand and the pages blurred before her. She was a little scared to see it, a little exhilarated. It was different, knowing it was Barry who was doing this and not some stranger. He was finished in less than seconds and when he looked up at her his face was stony and blotchy.

"Who else knows about this?" he asked.

"No one. Not yet." And she waited. She waited for him to break her heart again, for him to ask her to keep it to herself, to not tell anyone.

"When are you posting it up?"

And she let out her breath. "I'm not putting this on my blog."

"Then…what…?"

"I'm going to get this in the Central City Post."

"Oh. Fuck."

"Yeah, fuck is right. So get your shit together Flash, or Barry, or whoever it is you want to be to me—" and he almost visibly broke a little right in front of her and she thought _Good_ , "because I'm sending this to the editor tomorrow morning, and I guarantee you it will make it into this Sunday's paper."

She didn't wait for him to answer. She took the papers from his hands, ignoring how her fingers brushed against his, stuffed them back in her purse, and got up to leave. "I have to lock the doors." It came out sharper than she'd intended. He got up to follow her.

Outside she walked briskly down the sidewalk, purse slapping against her hip. She knew Barry was walking a few paces behind her. She stopped and he stopped. She started again and he started again. Three blocks, then four. She called over her shoulder, "What is it? Am I too fast for you?"

She turned around and he was before her before she could blink, no time had passed at all, and yet there he was standing in front of her when not one millisecond before he'd been hundreds of feet away. "Is this always going to happen to my hair?" she cracked.

Too soon. He broke. He didn't cry like her. He was quiet."Iris I'm so—"

"I know. I heard it the first five times."

"I wanted to tell you so badly."

"But you didn't. Why?"

"I don't—" he choked a little, "I don't know.

She sucked her teeth and shook her head. "Don't give me that." She started to walk away from him again, but then she stopped and rounded on him.

"Did you not trust me, is that it? Did you think I couldn't keep a secret? Didn't you think I deserved to know?" Her voice was getting louder and louder. "I expect this kind of thing from Dad, and I'll deal with him later, but you? Every time you told us about your mom he never believed you and I did! I believed you, Barry! And you can't even tell me? You can't even give me that courtesy? God, I was such a fool! Running around talking about The Flash this, the Flash that, talking about believing in the impossible, and here you are, _be-ing_ the impossible, and you don't tell me? Was it fun?"

"No, Iris, it's just—"

"Just _what_?"

"I was scared!"

"Scared that I would tell!"

"No! Scared that it would be too much!"

"Too much! Too much how?"

"I mean, you already believed me about my mom, you believed me about everything, I didn't want to make you have to believe again."

"And did I tell you I was tired of believing? Did I tell I had a problem with it? Did I, in any way shape or form, ever intimate to you that it was a burden for me, one that I no longer wanted? Well guess what, Barry, you don't get to tell me what I can take!"

Barry looked away from her. He'd stopped crying. He slid a hand down his face, slid a hand through his hair, walked in a small circle and came back to stand before her. He shrugged. "I fucked up," he said simply. He was blinking rapidly. His voice was shaking. She nodded at him slowly. "Yeah. You fucked up."

They stood across from each other. For Iris it seemed they stood there for hours. She wondered vaguely what it felt like for Barry. The night breeze was chilly. It whipped her skirt around her legs and her hair about her face. Looking at Barry she thought of all the intimacies they'd shared, of all the bits of herself she's placed in his open palms. She thought of all the ways in which he could hurt her, if he so chose, and all the ways in which he didn't, because he did choose. She thought of kissing him, of how much she wanted to, of how she never could, because they'd both done away with all the fantasies you need to have of someone to let yourself do something like fall for them. It really was a shame. She sighed, cocked her head to the side.

"Barry," she said, "I'm only going to ask you this once. Is there anything else you're keeping from me? Is there anything else I don't know, that I should?" He seemed to search her face, and there was an earnestness in his gaze that she was used to from him, but which now made her uncomfortable. She reached out suddenly, grabbed his hand to keep him there in front of her, to keep him from running off and running back to her without her knowing.

"Barry?"

He slowly shook his head at her. "No. No there's nothing else."

"You promise?"

"I promise."

8


End file.
